Monday, August 10, 2009

Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/) is a new digital project initiated by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress. The Web site provides descriptive information about all American newspapers published from 1690 to the present day, including those in languages other than English, such as Albanian, Arabic, Cherokee, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Norwegian, Thai, and many more.Information on a specific newspaper includes title, place of publication, publisher, dates of publication, frequency, succeeding titles, and a summary of available holdings, in original format or microfilm, at various institutions.

Digital images of select newspaper pages can also be viewed online. At this point in the project, only pages from English-language papers published from 1880 to 1992 from the following states are available: California, District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, Texas, Utah, and Virginia.

We at the MKI would of course like to be able to search, retrieve, and view pages from German-language newspapers, and hope they might be included in the scope of the project as it continues.No doubt researchers would like to see pages from newspapers published in all the other languages as well, which would help to create a richer picture of American history.

A search of the site shows that only Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada, and Vermont had no German-language newspapers, while Idaho, Maine, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Wyoming only had ones published in Prisoner of War camps.Consulting the impressive three-volume The German Language Press of the Americas by Karl Arndt and May Olson (München: Verlag Dokumentation, 3rd edition, 1976), shows just a few differences, particularly for Nevada, where there were apparently four extremely short-lived German-language papers. It may be that no copies survived, and thus none of the libraries reporting to the online project had any records for them.

Chronicling America is an important project, and we look forward to checking in on its progress in the future.

Subscribe Now: Feed Icon

Like us on Facebook!

We've leapt from the 19th to the 21st century -- check us out on Facebook!

25 Years or 325 Years

The Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (MKI) turned 25 years old in October of 2008. Sounds like a long time, but not much compared to the fact that the first German settlement in North America (Germantown, Pennsylvania) was established some 325 years ago.

We've started this blog as a way to showcase some of the work we're doing. We also see it as an opportunity to examine the influence immigrants have had on America—-after all, except for the indigenous people of the Americas, we're all of immigrant stock here.

We'll post some ideas that are running through our heads these days; we hope you'll find them of interest and will feel like offering your own comments.